A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America
W. W. Norton & Company, 2024
Agent: Elise Capron
A deeply researched narrative of the creation of the Port of Los Angeles, a central event in America’s territorial expansion and rise as a global economic power.
The Port of Los Angeles is the busiest container port in the Western Hemisphere. Material objects we use daily?furniture, apparel, footwear, electronics, and cars, primarily from East Asia?pass through it. It is also an engineering marvel, a port that should not have been possible. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, historian James Tejani narrates the port’s unlikely rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro’s estuary in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing how intrepid scientists, railroad titans, imperialist slaveholders, Civil War heroes, Mexican ranchers, and real estate speculators collided in southern California and fought over what San Pedro Bay could be?and to control it. Tejani’s story stretches to Washington, DC, the Mississippi delta, Southwest deserts, the Pacific Northwest, and even across oceans. As he shows, the making of the Port of Los Angeles changed the nation’s course?and the world’s.